Java was created by James Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist, while working at Sun Microsystems. He led the team that started the Java language project in 1991, initially aiming to develop a language for interactive television. Gosling designed Java with a syntax similar to C/C++ and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. The language was first released publicly in 1995 as part of Sun's Java platform
. James Gosling is widely recognized as the "father of Java" for his foundational role in its conception, design, and implementation
. The project was initially called Oak, then Green, before being renamed Java, inspired by Java coffee from Indonesia
. The language's key innovation was the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), enabling "write once, run anywhere" functionality by compiling code to platform- independent bytecode interpreted by the JVM
